Moore Foundation grantees at the University of Southern California have uncovered a turf war below the tranquil waters of the Pacific Ocean. These battles could help us understand the ocean's role in converting carbon dioxide into food sources for other deep-sea dwellers.
Marine Microbiology Initiative investigator Jed Fuhrman and his colleagues sampled water off the coast of Southern California over the course of five months, almost every day shortly after an algal bloom occurred, and found that the cloud of microorganisms is anything but uniform.
Instead, they found traces of a constant battle between dozens of species, with the fortunes of war favoring different organisms on a daily basis.
These tiny organisms, known as phytoplankton, make up the base of the food chain in the ocean and are the planet’s main scrubbers of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
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